Embracing social

@EdelmanPR has a new business: Managing corporate Twitter accounts

"Our traditional PR roots have always been about driving buzz . . . so we feel very comfortable in the social space." — Jay Porter, president, Edelman Chicago

In February, when CVS Caremark Corp. announced that it would stop selling cigarettes at its drugstores, Twitter immediately lit up with the hashtag #CVSquits. The retailer retweeted hundreds of laudatory messages from both public figures—including first lady Michelle Obama and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates—and regular customers.

Behind this nimble and effective outreach was CVS' public relations agency, Chicago-based Edelman.

The world's largest PR firm has expanded its influence beyond conventional media relations by establishing itself as a leader in the social media revolution. In the process, Edelman has unlocked a major new revenue stream—a rarity in a notoriously bumpy industry filled with peaks and valleys.

“It's a very different world from where PR was 20 years ago, or frankly from where people's outdated understanding of our space might be,” says Jay Porter, the new president of Edelman's Chicago office.

A nine-year Edelman veteran, Mr. Porter, 40, comes to the Chicago office—the company's second-largest behind New York, with 630 employees and $80 million in business—by way of Seattle, where he led the company's global Starbucks Corp. account.

Edelman's digital business now encompasses 800 employees around the globe, $117 million in revenue and more than 600 online communities managed on behalf of clients. Digital accounts for a fifth of the agency's global revenue, which increased nearly 12 percent to $707 million for the year ended June 30. Overall revenue has more than doubled since 2007, when Edelman pulled in $337 million.

The firm “certainly embraced social earlier than other agencies and the others have been rushing to catch up,” says Ron Culp, director of DePaul University's graduate PR and advertising program and an industry veteran. And while competitors have succeeded in making up ground over the past couple of years, “Edelman still has an advantage because a lot of clients think, 'I'm never going to get fired for hiring the biggest agency in the world.' “

Social assignments have exploded since 2009, but Edelman's online history stretches back 20 years to the Web 1.0 era. Back then, the firm's forte was designing and creating websites and email campaigns for clients. Edelman, which has handled the Butterball Turkey Talk Line since 1981, brought the famous Thanksgiving customer hotline to the Web in the mid-1990s. When client Odwalla Inc., a juice company headquartered in Half Moon Bay, Calif., came under fire in 1996 for E. coli-contaminated apple juice, Edelman created a site within a day to update and reassure customers.

But Edelman didn't really hit its sweet spot until companies began to embrace Facebook and Twitter. In 2011, the digital practice's revenue jumped by almost a third in the U.S., growing faster than any other business segment as the company learned how to engage customers more fully on social media platforms.

An example of how it did it: Edelman had managed to collect 200,000 “likes” for the Facebook page for Slim Jim beef jerky, owned by long-standing client ConAgra Foods Inc. But those fans showed little interest in interacting with the company. By introducing a community manager who hosted videos and responded to comments, Edelman quadrupled the number of Slim Jim post views and more than tripled the number of comments, likes and shares within a month. Today Slim Jim has 1.26 million likes.

“Edelman is constantly experimenting with the newest digital and social technology and looking around the corner to the future,” says Stephanie Moritz, senior director of social media and public relations for Omaha, Neb.-based ConAgra. More recently, Edelman helped Slim Jim start Snapchatting with customers and keep its Facebook content fresh by introducing something called a “beast meat beatdown” that pits different animal “mashups” like sharkbears or cheetahcrabs against each other. Judging by the thousands of likes each animal post receives, the content resonates with Slim Jim's 18- to 29-year-old male customers.

So far in 2014, the Chicago office has won digital-based business from a couple of Chicago companies, Cleversafe Inc., a data-storage company, and GrubHub Inc., a food-delivery service that just went public.

“Our traditional PR roots have always been about driving buzz and getting word of mouth that focuses on what's shareable, so we feel very comfortable in the social space,” Mr. Porter says.

He's particularly at ease with digital campaigns, having quarterbacked the integration of Starbucks' social and PR efforts and, before that, led Edelman's San Francisco business. “Jay smoothly integrates digital and classic PR campaigns,” says Richard Edelman, the firm's New York-based CEO since 1985.

Still, Mr. Porter cautions, “we're definitely not trying to replicate the big agency model” of Edelman's competitors, which are owned by four major holding companies that dominate the ad world. “One of the words we love here is scrappy, which goes back to when we didn't always have bigger budgets. We're trying to do rigorous and thoughtful work with more nimbleness and efficiency.”

quote|Jay Porter, president,Edelman Chicago

Our traditional PR roots have always been about driving buzz . . . so we feel very comfortable in the social space.

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